PET Lights Could Be Your Next Pet Project!

Did you know that it takes 200 - 300 years for a plastic water bottle or soda bottle to decompose? Horrible thought. The PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) material that is used to make the bottles can be reground, but that is a costly process.

The most efficient way to recycle plastic bottles is to reuse them, and Austrian design company Walking-Things.com has the perfect design-it-yourself solution! With the PET Light, which Walking-Things claims was the first ever hanging lamp system for plastic bottles, you can make one or a hundred hanging lamps, creating tame or totally wild ones.

The PET Light includes the light fixture, a cable and canopy, and a bottle holder suspension for 9 or 33 PET bottles. The 9 bottle suspension has about a 12 inch radius - without the bottles - and holds one regular light bulb. It is acrylic and comes in transparent, blue, red, and orange.

Your PET Light project can start with something as simple as this...

You can paint the plastic bottles or fill them with other recyclables... material remnants, ribbons, paper cuttings, the tear off strips from the bottle caps... whatever fits into the bottle hole or around the bottle. (If you decide against DIY, Walking-Things.com will ship you the entire chandelier, plastic bottles and all, pre-decorated uniquely for each customer. Order the PET Light Art Edition.)

The 9 bottle PET Light works very nicely en masse... Or you might want to move up to the PET Light 33 bottle suspension, made of malleable chrome steel. This version of PET Light comes with 33 PET bottles, all hand-shaped.

You can use groupings of the 9-holder PET Light or the 33-holder PET Light for a total wall or ceiling sculpture. Look what you can do with these!

All PET Lights come with instructions for heating your PET bottles and twisting them into various shapes. Who knows, maybe you can form images of your pet with your PET bottles to create a PET Light chandelier as your pet project. (Okay, I've had enough too!)

Go visit Walking-Things.com to see the 9 bottle PET Light and the 33 bottle PET Light . It's a fun website! (Update: Unfortunately, site is no longer online.)

The photos displayed are printed with permission of Walking-Things.com and may not be used without express permission from Walking-Things.com.

Reusing something is not the same as recycling it. Reusing it removes it from the cycle. Recycling it puts it back into the product cycle. Though reuse is a very good thing and should be encouraged, it actually hampers recycling because it has removed raw recycleable material from the system. This is a clever idea and though it will keep bottles out of a landfill, it will not help recycle them. The most efficient way to recycle bottles is to deliver them to a recycling center.